More shenanigans from the Canadian tech right

I was sick for a couple of weeks (the joys of a child newly in daycare) and haven't had the chance to go through more of the Build Canada memos, which is a shame because they keep pumping out more tepid takes, but there's enough other action that I'll have to sideline that project.

At some point in the past week, Build Canada purged the Supporters section of their About page (c.f. Feb 18th on Internet Archive). Gone is the list of 27 tech executives (including the CEO, COO, and President of Shopify) saying "rah rah, we're part of this mission", though their names are still attached to individual memos they support. We can't say whether this is because some of the people were not thrilled about implicitly endorsing every boneheaded memo on the site, related to Poillievre's much diminished lead in the polls, or because of concerns regarding the optics of including the whole exec team of the company that wanted to make it VERY CLEAR that they did not take down Kanye's swastika store due to concerns about Nazis, but in any case it's not a great look.

Of more interest to me is that Build Canada has now claimed responsibility for canada_spends, the anonymous Twitter account that started up several months ago that launched its own website this week.

Much like Build Canada itself, canada_spends claims nonpartisanship, asserting "We take raw data and transform it into easy to understand facts for Canadians. We don’t tell you what to think. We don’t weigh in on whether spending is good or bad." This is the sort of statement that I suppose might provide plausible deniability to a certain type of STEMlord who is incapable of understanding nuance, but for the rest of us hopefully it's clear that between the choices made in the transformation process and the editorial discretion used in selecting which raw data to transform, the platform is absolutely attempting to persuade irrespective of whether it explicitly says "you should think this is bad".

As an example, here's a tweet from the account.

I would suggest that anyone claiming this tweet does not "weigh in on whether spending is good or bad" can't even be understood misunderstand persuasion in good faith. They're lying, brazenly, and trusting that they'll get away with it. The "easy to understand" transformation of comparing these expenditures to how many Blackhawks could be leased (no specificity on lease duration, weird) is presented without the context that this money represents a small fraction of the money the country already committed to border security in response to the initial tariff threats, never mind the more salient context that the US insisted that border security would not prevent the tariffs. You will be shocked to learn that, while his name no longer appears anywhere on either the Canada Spends or Build Canada team pages, this Disneyland fairy tale that the tariffs are in response to a bonafide American concern about Canadian border security that can be addressed via helicopters has been central to Tobi Lutke's Trump apologia for the past month.

Speaking of team pages, Canada Spends' page has surprisingly little overlap with Build Canada's. Only Lucy Hargreaves, a former staffer for Catherine McKenna and Mona Fortier (and sole tie to any political operation other than the Conservative Party) appears on both. Joining her are tech executives Brice Scheschuk and Shane Parrish (both formerly appearing on the purged Build Canada supporters list), a former Koho employee (Koho CEO Daniel Eberhard seems to be central to the Build Canada cabal), a current Shopify employee, and, not to be outdone by Elon's cadre of teenagers, a second year Queens engineering student.

On balance I'm glad that Canada Spends is now out in the open. 'Obviously connected but not officially so' anonymous Twitter account is the sort of thing that is hard to gesture towards without people expecting you to don a tinfoil hat, so it's polite of them to come out and acknowledge it. I'm also pleased that they seem to have gotten very little traction so far. My hope is that the past month of implosion in the US, combined with threats to Canadian sovereignty, has inculcated a bit of healthy distrust of tech execs in the Canadian public. Unfortunately I don't think they're going away, so we'll need to keep an eye on them.